


the bad boys, always catching my eye

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Smart People [8]
Category: Primeval
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 13:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3291500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CMU is not a great place to be single.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the bad boys, always catching my eye

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone recognising the title quote will realise this is not at all a serious fic (Alexandra Burke: I have no shame). Nonetheless, it has been screened for excessive crazy by Luka.

            Jenny hovered impatiently on the wide steps outside CMU, waiting for Claudia to appear. Whatever it was that had kept her stuck in the office, it couldn’t be that bad, and Jenny had a selection of terrible rom-coms, a large bottle of wine, and a collective bitch about their respective appalling love-lives to share with her. Claudia had taken her disappointment over discovering that pretty-but-deranged Professor Cutter was in a relationship very graciously and now claimed to be happily single. Jenny, who’d spent the last week fending off Helen Cutter with a stick – she’d had to have a few meetings with the woman, in order to formulate a response to a very gossipy article the Times Education people were threatening to publish, which obliquely named and shamed Helen as having slept with more than twenty of her students in her previous tenure at CMU – and firing off frosty emails to her former fiancé Mark, who wanted the ring back and wasn’t going to get it, found her half-sister’s composure deeply irritating.

 

            For God’s sake! She just wanted a decent chance to whine, and nobody at CMU but Claudia combined willingness to listen with a patient awareness that Jenny would rant for forty-five minutes straight and the best thing to do was just nod and look serious, excepting Dave Owen. And Dave was too busy adoring Hilary Becker to really listen. And Jenny was getting a distinct I’m-gearing-up-to-proposition-you vibe from Dean Kory K, the arse, and she wanted to hold a council of war, or at least shout and swear a lot. So where the fuck had Claudia got to?

 

            Abruptly, she became aware that there was someone behind her, and adrenaline spiked and she whirled sharply, finding herself face-to-face with Niall Richards.

 

“ _Fuck_!” she squeaked, and recoiled a step or two.

 

“I didn’t think I walked that quietly,” Richards said, suffering from both a sudden resurgence of his Yorkshire accent and a faintly startled look on his face.

 

“I’m sure,” Jenny muttered. Like most people, Richards made her a bit nervous, although a few of the less self-preserving undergrads (male and female) were prone to fluttering their eyelashes at him and trying helplessly to flirt; the fact that he had no empathy whatsoever and was therefore kept well away from anything smaller and more fragile than a Master’s student apparently added to his mystique rather than his red flags. Jenny didn’t consider herself naturally anxious, and wasn’t actually sure why she instinctively steered clear of him. It was probably something about the affinity for dangerous machines and the Leatherman permanently hooked on to his belt.

 

“Are you waiting for someone?” Richards persisted.

 

Jenny had never heard him utter two sentences in one go. This _was_ an event. “Yes. Claudia Brown, who’s been stuck with Quality Assurance? She’s my sister.”

 

Richards frowned. “Working a bit late. Even Dr Wickes has gone home.”

 

“Dr Wickes never goes home,” Jenny muttered, stabbing at her phone to send Claudia yet another irritable text. “She lives in a sleeping bag under her desk, lovingly supplied with food and water by Sarah. Oh for fuck’s sake, Claud-”

 

She broke off abruptly and blinked at Richards, who still had the residue of a grin on his face. It was, however, slowly changing to a look of complete confusion as she stared at him.

 

“What?” he said defensively, sharp tone reminding Jenny why she was wary of him in the first place.

 

 “Did you just _laugh_?” she demanded.

 

“Yes! It was funny!”

 

“I’ve never even seen you smile!”

 

Richards shifted his weight from foot to foot. He was looking down at Jenny with seemingly genuine bemusement and slight offence, straight dark eyebrows knotted. “You don’t exactly pop round to Engineering to say hi a lot, do you? And I avoid PR like the fucking plague, excuse my French.”

 

“Of course you do,” Jenny said, successfully looking down her nose at him. “You’d be shit at it.”

 

            “Obviously,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “But I thought you actually knew who I was. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you and make you scream!”

 

            “It was a completely rational response to the situation!”

 

            “Granted, and I’m _sorry_ , but... I don’t bite, yeah?” Richards looked acutely embarrassed. “Is your sister OK? Are you going to need to go and find her?”

 

            “I’m sure she’s fine, just – oh, look what the cat dragged out.” Jenny glared at Claudia’s hurriedly approaching, conservatively dressed figure, and made several gestures that translated, in sibling terms, to gruesome death and brimstone wrath.

 

            Richards gave that sort of half-chuckle again. It was sort of nice. At least, it was definitely nicer than his usual methods of communication, which consisted of incomprehensible papers with notes in the margins that he’d obviously tried and failed to write clearly, blank expressions, and glowers fit to kill. “OK. See you later, Jenny. Sorry for scaring you.”

           

            “Bye,” Jenny said absently, and turned away.

 

            “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Claudia said, practically tumbling to a stop at her feet. “I had a call from Lorraine. Stephen’s apparently having more trouble with Helen and he’s only just admitted it to Sarah and he hasn’t told Nick at all, and that woman, really –”

 

            “I’m working on getting rid of her, but it’s hard when all she does is try to get into my knickers,” Jenny said, steering Claudia towards her car.

 

            Claudia giggled. “No! Really? God, Jen, poor you. Maybe we could get her on sexual harassment charges. Who was that you were talking to, by the way?”

 

            “Niall Richards. The mad one from Engineering.”

 

            “Mad but fit,” Claudia corrected cheerfully. “He has a very nice arse. I saw.”

 

            Jenny dragged Claudia out of the way of an oncoming car leaving the car park, and Niall Richards raised a hand from behind the wheel, his face a careful blank.

 

            “Claudia,” Jenny said, feeling her cheeks heat as she returned the wave, “you are the worst half-sister ever.”

 

            “But you love me anyway,” Claudia said comfortably. “Particularly because you want me to cook dinner. Anyway, weren’t you saying something about needing a relationship that wasn’t shit from start to finish?”

 

            “Yes,” Jenny sighed, getting into the driving seat of her car and having serious second thoughts about letting Claudia into her house ever again. “I mean – around here everyone’s coupled up, or that’s what it looks like, anyway. The Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Ryan. Stephen and Cutter the Nutter. Sarah and Lorraine, bless their adorable, Sapphic little socks – what are they up to now, their third anniversary? And Becker may be gun-shy just now but you know he wants to settle down and have Dave’s sweet little physiologically impossible babies anyway.  Everyone who’s single here is either mad or you! But I’m still not desperate enough to ask Niall Richards out.”

 

            “You seemed to be getting along with him well enough.” Claudia snuggled back into her seat and watched Jenny with hooded, suspiciously guileless brown eyes.

 

            “He was fine,” Jenny said grudgingly, and automatically filtered out the words ‘quite charming, really, and I got to hear him laugh’. Claudia would only seize on them. “But really, he’s mad. I mean, he made Jess Parker cry!”

 

            “Jess Parker?”

 

            “Economics. Redhead. Prodigy. Can’t be more than seventeen, I had to field a journalist who wanted to use her in a piece about underage students with the snappy title of ‘Underage Undergrads’. Harbours unrequited passion for Hilary. Someone bollocksed up a printer Niall was trying to use and since she was trying to fix it with that handy-dandy little pocket screwdriver set of hers, he jumped to conclusions and blamed her.” Jenny blew out a breath and sent much of her fringe flying upwards. “Lorraine had to give him a stern talking-to – she’s Jess’ personal tutor. He apologised, but Lorraine says Jess still hides behind pot-plants, doors, and convenient rugby players whenever she sees him.”

 

            “There could be extenuating circumstances,” Claudia argued. “He’s filing applications for grants right now, isn’t he?”

 

            “I have no idea. And there you go, always thinking the best of people,” Jenny said. “Let me tell you what Mark said in his latest. He’s outrageous. I can’t believe I ever even considered marrying him!”

 

            “Personally I thought mixing us up to the point where he felt me up and called you Claudia was a bit of a deal-breaker, yes. Well, spill. Is he still banging on about the ring?”

 

            Jenny drew a deep breath, opened her mouth and launched herself into the rant she’d been planning since ten o’clock that morning.

 

            She kept to herself the memory of the end of Niall Richards’ grin, and his quiet half-laugh.


End file.
